Wednesday, February 18, 2009

Amsterdam: FTTH penetration at 35%

When Amsterdam, KPN and Reggefiber recently announced that they were close to entering Phase 2 of the munifiber build-out, they were somewhat secretive about the number of homes activated. A local journalist pulled it out of one of the managers: 3k, on a total of 43k, which makes a penetration rate of 7%. Since work started 3 years ago, that was a less than impressive number.

However, things need a little clarification, as an insider informs me. First, hooking up was made available just 2 years ago. Second, yes there have been all sorts of everyday problems in rolling out. Third, Amsterdam not only counts homes passed (43k) and homes activated (3k), but homes connected too. The latter number stands at 9k, for a penetration rate of 35%.

What a little PR can do.

Still, the number of homes passed would still be of interest to me. I guess we need some 'performance measurement' standards when it comes to measuring penetration rates.

Lastly, the FTTH Council numbers last week also build upon the number of homes passed. See this IDATE information to find out some detail on the number of subscribers (= homes activated). The Netherlands stand at 350k homes passed and 29% (101.5k) of that as homes activated.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Hi Tim,

I think this whole GNA thing is a bit less black and white then in recent press publications was stated.

GNA is the first real 3-layer model open FTTH network, hence can be seen als the blueprint off all things happening in the nation these days.

It was a big learning curve I would say for all parties involved.
The wheel was more or less invented on matters like technologies, processes and marketing.

Besides this, the footprint is the relatively easy to target lowhanging fruits like vinex areas in Amersfoort or Elburg or someting, where a set of coherent people live, with interest (see the local ambasadors).

Next to the fact that it is a largescale project with real metropolitan complexities like multi-tendant buildings, organising digging permissions for house owners, multi-culture neighbourhoods, dislike of people seeing the streets being opened once more (yeah amsterdam is a allways a mess, is the people's experience), etc.

Anyway, my five cents...

NGA UK said...

Interesting... at the FTTH Council bash last week there was a session called the Dutch Connection (presenters from KPN, GNA and Reggefiber). We heard from Bert Nijboer, CEO of Reggefiber and he quoted the following numbers:

7.3 million homes (total) in NL
4.5 million in densely populated areas
Their aim is to 'connect' 2 million homes by 2012
Today they have passed 300 thousand homes and connected 200 thousand.

Hard to figure out where the truth lies but the take rate has to be higher if these projects are to succeed.